A multistage stochastic programming model for the New Zealand dairy industry

This paper presents an application of multistage stochastic programming to a production planning problem for Fonterra, a leading company in the New Zealand dairy industry, taking into account uncertain milk supply, price–demand curves and contracting. We describe a model for Fonterra's supply chain, and a model for uncertain milk supply. We then present a multistage stochastic quadratic programming model and a decomposition algorithm to compute an optimal sales policy, which is tested in simulation against a deterministic policy.